Review: Governors Ball Is Ruled by Women

Slide Show | A Wide Musical Lineup at Governors Ball, With Women Leading the Way The fifth annual Governors Ball festival, on Randalls Island, featured strong and strange music by women, who were outnumbered by men.

Santiago Felipe

By JON PARELES

June 8, 2015

Women brought the strongest and strangest music to the fifth annual Governors Ball festival, held Friday through Sunday on Randalls Island. They were worldly and otherworldly, heroic and vulnerable, proudly pop-savvy or defining their own kinds of fringe. Of course, they were outnumbered by men, who held most of the headlining slots.

In five years, Governors Ball has established itself as New York City’s manageable rival to larger and more remote pop festivals. It hasn’t defined itself as clearly as the fashion-minded Coachella or the jam-loving, down-home Bonnaroo, which share some of the same artists. Instead, it offered enough variety and depth to suit all sorts of concertgoers, with headliners from hip-hop (Drake), pop (Lana Del Rey), electronic dance music (Deadmau5) and rootsy rock (Ryan Adams, My Morning Jacket, the Black Keys). There was even one full-fledged country singer, Sturgill Simpson. The lineup also included Weird Al Yankovic, racing through his parodies of radio hits with videos and costumes and drawing roars of recognition for each familiar hook from the annals of the Top 10.

But at this year’s Governors Ball, women had the larger ideas and more ambitious sets.

There was Ms. Del Rey, a headliner on Sunday night, languidly crooning about desire and pain as thousands of fans sang along. Songs that purr smoothly and steadily on her albums became tempestuous, at least with the band, and featured piercing guitar lines and eruptions of drums, magnifying the warring impulses that Ms. Del Rey’s serenity conceals.

There was Björk, masked and dressed as a butterfly. When she played theaters like Carnegie Hall earlier this year, the songs from her album “Vulnicura” — backed by a string orchestra and electronics — were hushed and intimate, immersed in the sorrow of the breakup they chronicle. They didn’t sound much like festival fare. But on Saturday evening, they were. The electronics, churning underneath the strings, were more prominent and more disruptive; the strings dug into each dissonant tremolo chord; giant videos depicted harsh landscapes and voracious insects. Björk sang out, finding all the rage behind the heartbreak and connecting it to older, more combative songs like “Hunter” and “Army of Me,” bristling even more in new arrangements. They were fiery even before the flash pots flared onstage.

There was Florence Welch, leading Florence and the Machine, dancing and running around onstage on Friday in her first “standing” concert, she announced, since she broke her foot jumping offstage at Coachella in April. Her songs draw on Celtic tunes, rock propulsion and soul dynamics, backed by a band including a harp and a horn section. They build from uncertainty to affirmation to catharsis; she ended many of them with arms outstretched, a wide-open embrace.

There was St. Vincent, the band led by Annie Clark, whose songs whipsaw amid sweet vocals, ferocious guitar, riddles and revelations. She has staged them with the cool deliberation of synchronized dance moves, which just make them more puzzling.

There was Little Dragon, featuring the singer Yukimi Nagano, which touched down in crowd-pleasing four-on-the-floor dance beats just often enough to spring away into odder, more angular melodies and electronic excursions. There was Sharon Van Etten, a songwriter and long-breathed singer whose meditations on longing grew hypnotic and immersive.

There were terse pop songwriters: Charli XCX, brash and cheeky, and Marina and the Diamonds, led by Marina Diamandis, who switched from flirt to prima donna at whim. There was Charlotte OC, who unfurled desperate lovers’ questions over long-smoldering crescendos. There was White Lung, a roar of punk-rock. And there was Kate Tempest, an English rapper (and playwright) with torrents of vehement, rapid-fire rhymes calling for honesty, courage and justice in a world suffused with avarice and marketing.

Drake’s headlining set had its own ambivalence about a world of branding, even as he boasted about being a leading brand in hip-hop. Much of it came from “If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late,” his 2015 mixtape that’s full of sullen reflections on success: distrust, overwork, conspicuous consumption, the determination to stay true to himself. Even more than his rhymes, his stylized delivery was what made him so individualistic. They were brief, brittle lines, half-sung and half-rapped and often just two syllables: hip-hop as Morse code or playground taunt.

Some opposite extreme was staked out by the Australian band Tame Impala. Often pigeonholed as psychedelic, that band might be better described as expansive. It lets guitar and keyboard sounds ripple and blur, and as digital light-show patterns flickered on the video screen, Tame Impala was equally comfortable with a Motown beat or the kind of stately processional that can get a whole festival crowd swaying slowly.

The festival’s musical pluralism — or is it just being noncommittal? — didn’t please all the performers. Mr. Adams was headlining on Saturday night while on the main stage Deadmau5 pumped out electronic dance music that was clearly audible between Mr. Adams’s songs. He snarled at the “robot music,” adding, “We’re living in a ‘Terminator’ nightmare,” and bragging that his songs couldn’t be written on an iPhone. His stage set was another statement: It included larger-than-life Fender guitar speakers, old arcade games like Asteroids and an American flag with a peace symbol. Mr. Adams’s songs were neatly and proudly rooted in the 1960s and 1970s of Tom Petty, the Grateful Dead, Neil Young and the Beatles; he let some songs float toward introspective jamming, twinkling across the open field.

But the “robot music” had a much larger crowd. On a stage set with geodesic constructions, Deadmau5 worked through a recurring cycle: somber, quasi-classical chords, often with church-organ tones, segueing all too predictably into head-bobbing dance beats. D.J.s in other slots were daring. Flying Lotus toyed with slow, lurching beats and sometimes no beat, luring dancers into motion before veering elsewhere; at one point he playfully dropped in a rap from Drake, using it more as percussion than lead vocal. Odesza assembled dense, mournful tracks before aligning them with pop vocals; Sbtrkt piled up crisp percussion sounds to give his tracks an Afro-Caribbean lift.

The dance music didn’t have to be robotic. Hot Chip writes pop songs to dance beats with a streak of disco nostalgia, and on Sunday night the group brought out the hand-played side of its music — the drummer was flesh-and-blood — even as the set meshed songs and percussion workouts together like a disco D.J. The group Rudimental, with D.J.s, live singers and musicians, had a good trick: Its choruses burst into the frenetic double time beat of drum-and-bass.

Mr. Simpson’s country music made him the festival’s odd-man-out booking, even though his tour also includes Coachella and Bonnaroo. He sang, in a troubled, honeyed voice suggesting both Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, about love, loneliness, the road and the struggle with sin. But then his band would throttle up to bluegrass speed, and at about 155 beats per minute, he had the crowd dancing, too.